Book Review: RABBIT FACE AND FURTHER AWFUL ENCOUNTERS

by | Aug 4, 2025 | Author News, Book Reviews, Reviews, The Horror Review News | 0 comments

Rabbit Face and Further Awful Encounters
Thomas C. Mavroudis
JournalStone Publishing (April 25, 2025)
Reviewed by Andrew Byers

In Rabbit Face and Further Awful Encounters, Thomas C. Mavroudis offers readers a compelling collection of thirteen literary horror stories that are both richly atmospheric and deeply unsettling. This is Mavroudis’s debut collection, and it announces the arrival of a distinct voice in weird fiction, one that confidently blends the uncanny with emotional depth and narrative precision.

The titular story, “Rabbit Face,” is a standout work of psychological horror. Set in a snowbound cabin on a remote mountain lake, it follows young Gordon as he accompanies his father and uncle on a winter fishing trip that slowly turns hallucinatory and horrific. With prose that is quietly lyrical and charged with dread, Mavroudis captures the ambiguity of trauma, the complexity of familial relationships, and the terrible pull of the wilderness. The story’s slow-burn unease, paired with a genuinely frightening climax involving a mysterious rabbit mask and a doppelgänger-like presence, makes for one of the most memorable horror tales in recent memory.

The pieces that follow vary considerably in tone, structure, and style, but are unified by their interest in identity, memory, and the intrusion of the irrational into the everyday. In “The Bloody Cask of Rasputin,” Mavroudis pivots to paranoid debauched horror, weaving together Cold War anxieties, a pagan immortality cult, and tabloid sleaze. The result is a pulpy but tightly constructed narrative that wears its literary and pop-cultural influences with pride while carving out something wholly original. It’s this kind of tonal flexibility—equal parts darkly comic and sincerely terrifying—that gives the collection its vitality.

Another standout is “Antumbra,” a surreal and claustrophobic tale set within a childhood home’s crawlspace. Here, the author evokes the feel of early Clive Barker and Thomas Ligotti, where subterranean spaces and half-seen figures suggest not only monsters, but buried traumas. Likewise, “A Pantheon of Trash” and “Dinner and a Show” experiment with narrative voice and form, revealing Mavroudis’s range as both a stylist and a storyteller.

Despite the eclecticism of its contents, the collection is cohesive in its mood and motifs. Many stories explore the legacy of violence—familial, historical, or cosmic—and the disorienting ways in which past and present bleed into each other. The settings range from grimy urban apartments to isolated forests, from Cold War-era England to contemporary America, yet each story is rooted in character and atmosphere. The horror in these tales is rarely straightforward. Instead, it is existential, internalized, and often tied to the failures of communication and the slow erosion of self.

Mavroudis is especially skilled at evoking a kind of middle space between the real and the unreal, often leaving readers with a lingering sense of wrongness that refuses neat resolution. His language is spare but evocative, and his dialogue—particularly in family scenes—is naturalistic and emotionally resonant. This is horror fiction for readers who appreciate ambiguity, emotional nuance, and a willingness to stare into the abyss without blinking.

Rabbit Face and Further Awful Encounters is a confident and accomplished debut. Mavroudis writes with the assurance of someone who understands the uncanny not as a trope but as a psychological condition. Fans of literary horror, particularly those who admire the work of Robert Aickman, Brian Evenson, or Laird Barron, will find much to admire here.

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